The Syria Analysis Thread

10 posts

franko

Interesting transcript of a private conversation involving Davutoglu (Minister of Foreign Affairs), Fidan (Director of National Intelligence Agency), Sinirliouglu (Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs) and Guler (Chief of Armed Forces).

They discuss employing a false flag attack and using it as a pretext to invade Syria. Turkish (amongst others) hunger for Shi'ite blood could be about to up the ante in Syria.

https://app.box.com/s/w3pepn5m9dmkers6xleg

Longface
Dutch Jesuit priest shot dead in Syria — after refusing to flee besieged city

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He died for the country he loved.

A Dutch priest was beaten and shot to death in the garden of his monastery in the embattled Syrian city of Homs on Monday, after refusing to seek refuge in a safer place.
Rev. Frans Van Der Lugt, a 75-year-old Jesuit priest, was dragged outside his home and shot twice in the head by a single masked gunman.

Rev. Ziad Hillal, one of the 24 Christians who lived in the monastery, said that the violence was a “premeditated act” that specifically targeted the beloved, elderly priest.
"I am truly shocked. A man of peace has been murdered," Hillal said.

Van Der Lugt moved to Syria from the Netherlands in the early 1970s. The Jesuit priest — who is from the same order as Pope Francis — learned Arabic and developed a strong connection to his adopted home.

When civil war broke out and Assad’s forces started a siege on Homs, the priest offered shelter to both Muslim and Christian families.

And when a truce allowed 1,500 people to evacuate the city in January, Van Der Lugt refused to budge. He didn’t want to leave his people.

“I don’t see Muslims or Christians, I see, above all, human beings (who) hunger to lead a normal life,” Lugt said in a February interview. “How can I leave? This is impossible.”

Both rebel and government backed away from taking responsibility for the attack, pointing fingers at the other side.

State media blamed “terrorists” for the killing, a word President Bashar Assad’s regime uses to describe the rebels.

Beibars Tilawi, an activist from a rebel-held area in Homs, said rebel fighters were outraged by the killing.

"The man was living with us, eating with us, sleeping with us. He didn't leave, even when the blockade was eased," Tilawi said. Regardless of the rebels' views toward Christians, the priest was well-liked for his efforts to get the blockade lifted and alleviate widespread suffering and hunger among civilians, Tilawi said.

Homs has been under siege by government forces for the past two years. The war has already claimed more than 150,000 lives, the New York Times reports.

Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi said the 75-year-old Van Der Lugt, was "a man of peace, who with great courage had wanted to remain faithful, in an extremely risky and difficult situation, to the Syrian people to whom he had dedicated, for a long time, his life and spiritual service."
Longface

Of course "gunman" or "assassin'' is just code word for the rebels.

Longface
Warily, Jordan Assists Rebels in Syrian War

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IRBID, Jordan — When rebels want to return to Syria to fight, Jordan’s intelligence services give them specific times to cross its border. When the rebels need weapons, they make their request at an “operations room” in Amman staffed by agents from Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United States.

During more than three years of civil war in Syria, this desert nation has come to the world’s attention largely because it has struggled to shelter hundreds of thousands of refugees. But, quietly, Jordan has also provided a staging ground for rebels and their foreign backers on Syria’s southern front. In the joint Arab-American operations room in Amman, the capital, for example, rebels say they have collected salaries as an incentive not to join better-funded extremist groups.

But this covert aid has been so limited, reflecting the Obama administration’s reluctance to get drawn into another Middle Eastern conflict, that rebels say they have come to doubt that the United States still shares their goal of toppling President Bashar al-Assad.

In fact, many rebels say they believe that the Obama administration is giving just enough to keep the rebel cause alive, but not enough to actually help it win, as part of a dark strategy aimed at prolonging the war. They say that in some cases their backers even push them to avoid attacking strategic targets, part of what they see as that effort to keep the conflict burning.

“The aid that comes in now is only enough to keep us alive, and it covers only the lowest level of needs,” said Brig. Gen. Asaad al-Zoabi, a Syrian fighter pilot who defected and now works in the operations room.

“They call it aid, but I don’t consider it aid,” he said. “I consider it buying time and giving people the illusion that there is aid when really there is not.”

While much attention has been focused on Syria’s northern front, where rebels move in freely from neighboring Turkey, the southern region has been far more controlled. And despite recent reports of an invigorated “southern front” of rebel forces, recent interviews with more than two dozen rebel commanders, fighters and Jordanian and foreign officials painted a picture of a largely stagnant southern battlefield, one that is heavily influenced by outside powers whose main goals are to limit the rise of extremists and preserve stability in Jordan.

Increasing the military threat against Mr. Assad is not part of the plan, rebels say.
Publicly, the United States is providing more than $260 million in “nonlethal support” to the Syrian opposition, including rebel groups it does not consider extremist. But the military aid is covert, and the countries involved have not disclosed what they provide.

None of this aid has significantly advanced the rebels’ cause or helped achieve the American goal of a negotiated end to the war. To the contrary, peace talks have been suspended indefinitely and Mr. Assad is likely to remain president, perhaps for a long time to come.

But a White House spokeswoman, Caitlin Hayden, said on Thursday that “the notion that the United States wants fighting to be drawn out is flat wrong. We are committed to building the capacity of the moderate opposition and seeking a way to end the bloodshed and the needless suffering of the Syrian people.”

She added: “There is no military solution to this conflict. What is needed is a negotiated political transition.”

The State Department and the C.I.A. declined to comment, and Jordan publicly denies helping any of Syria’s warring parties.

But in the towns near Jordan’s border with Syria where many rebels keep their families and take breaks from the war, the operations room, known as the Military Operations Command, is an open secret.

Rebel commanders say they travel to Amman to appeal to the officials there for arms and cash for their fighters.

“We go to them, we explain what we want to do, and they ask about the target and how many fighters we have,” said Brig. Gen. Abdullah Qarayiza, who leads a rebel group in the Syrian town of Nawa. His arms requests had been rejected twice, he said.

But for each of the last two months, he said he had received $25,000 in cash to pay his men $50 each.

“What is $50 for a fighter who has a wife and kids?” he said. “He can barely buy cigarettes.”

Rebels who have visited the operations headquarters say its decisions balance the interests of the main players: Saudi Arabia provides funding and pushes for greater rebel support; Jordan manages the border and urges caution; and the United States supervises, maintaining a veto on weapon shipments.

While the operations room has provided ammunition, rifles and antitank missiles, it refuses to provide the antiaircraft missiles that rebels say could stop the bombings of rebel towns that have killed thousands of civilians.

The center also coordinates a C.I.A. program to train rebel fighters that was authorized by President Obama in April of last year. It was supposed to provide 380 fighters a month with training, rifles, ammunition and antitank weapons so they could return to Syria and train their colleagues.

But officials and rebel leaders say the program is actually much smaller. General Zoabi said that there had been three sessions in the Jordanian desert with 15 to 30 fighters each, and that the training scarcely benefited fighters who already had extensive battlefield experience.

“It’s as if you take someone who runs the 100-meter dash in 10 seconds and you tell him, ‘I’m going to teach you to run it in 20,’ ” he said.

Other rebels estimated that a few hundred fighters had been trained, but even as the Obama administration considers expanding the program, Jordan imposes limits to try to keep the program secret.

“It has been essentially a check-the-box exercise that has not been large enough to make a difference on the ground or to prevent the exodus of Syrian men to jihadist groups that have food, money, ammunition and can take care of their people,” said Frederic C. Hof, a former State Department official who is now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington.

Rebels are of two minds about the support. They like the antitank missiles that have helped against Mr. Assad’s armor, and they acknowledge that Jordan’s border management has prevented the chaos seen in the north, where Turkey’s lax border controls have helped create a free-for-all zone of jihadists backed by private funds .
In the south, the Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s main affiliate in Syria, is not a leading power, and the radical Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has almost no presence.

“The situation is good: Jordan controls the border and arms are not brought in randomly,” said Bashar al-Zoabi, the head of the Yarmouk Division, a rebel group.

But he was frustrated that the rebels’ supporters seemed more interested in conflict management than in a victory.

“We know that if you wanted to, you could topple Bashar al-Assad in 10 days,” he said.
Jordan has approached the war cautiously, because its population is divided over the uprising and its leaders know they will remain next door to Syria regardless of who wins the war.

At times, Jordan has pressured the rebels to withdraw from strategic territory. Last year, rebels blocked the main highway between Amman and Damascus for more than a month, halting trade until Jordan intervened with rebel leaders to open the road, said General Zoabi of the Military Operations Command in Amman.

Now, cargo trucks ply the road daily and enter Jordan through a crossing still run by the Syrian government, which is surrounded by rebel forces who know that attacking the facility could jeopardize their own border access.

Some rebels played down the importance of the Military Operations Command, saying it had no role in rebel victories like the recent seizure of a prison . And General Zoabi acknowledged that its main job was to coordinate humanitarian aid and that its military support was minimal.

“If the revolutionaries need 100 percent, what they get is 10 percent,” he said. Other supplies are captured or purchased inside Syria, he said, but that still leaves the rebels with only 50 percent of what they need.

Like many rebels, General Zoabi said he suspected that the limited aid sought to prolong the war as a way to weaken Syria so that it could not threaten Israel.

When asked why he continued to work for the Military Operations Command, he compared himself to a man dying of thirst who can see clean water in the distance but can reach only dirty water.

“Do I die, or do I drink from the water that isn’t clean?” he said. “I am forced to drink dirty water, but it is better for me to live than to die.”
Longface
Twin car bombs in Syria's Homs kill at least 21 people

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(Reuters) - At least 21 people including women and children were killed by twin car bombs in the central Syrian city of Homs on Wednesday, a monitoring group and state media said.
The explosions went off in the Karam al-Loz area of Homs, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, and the death toll was expected to rise because over 100 people were wounded, some seriously.
Syrian state news agency SANA put the death toll at 25, saying it included women and children. It said 107 people were wounded, including one of the agency's photographers.
Quoting an unnamed local source, SANA said the first bomb went off near a sweets store on a busy street, followed by a second one in the same district about half an hour later.
The explosions "caused heavy damage to citizens' property, homes, stores and cars in the neighbourhood," it said.
The Observatory, an anti-Assad group that monitors violence on both sides through a network of sources in Syria , said the area was inhabited largely by Alawites, the Shi'ite Islam-derived sect of President Bashar al-Assad. It put the death toll at 21.
The rebels fighting to overthrow Assad are overwhelmingly Sunni.
A blast in Homs on Sunday killed at least 29 rebels, including two field commanders, the Observatory said at the time.

Syria's conflict has killed over 150,000 people and forced millions more to flee their homes.
Stubby

JaN regional commander of Idlib assassinated, allegedly by ISIS men

From the Long War Journal

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Sham is reported to have killed Abu Muhammad al Ansari, the leader of the Al Nusrah Front for the People of the Levant in Idlib province. The report has not been officially confirmed by the Al Nusrah Front.
Al Ansari's death was reported by "trusted sources" to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an independent media group that covers the Syrian civil war.
According to the Observatory, "4 ISIS sleepers from Harem area entered his house last night in Ras Al-Hesen village" in Idlib province "in order to check on his [al Ansari's] health after an accident he was exposed to few days ago." The ISIS assassination team "killed his wife, his 2 children, and both of his brothers, who were in the house."
Al Ansari's death has not been confirmed by the Al Nusrah Front or top jihadist leaders in the group. However there are numerous reports of his death on the social media pages of various jihadists in Syria.
The Al Nusrah Front and the ISIS, which was disowned by al Qaeda's General Command earlier this year for failing to resolve differences with rival jihadist and Syrian rebel groups, have been clashing for months. The ISIS has targeted and killed senior Al Nusrah Front leaders in the past. The ISIS is accused of killing Abu Khalid al Suri, al Qaeda's representative to Syria, in a suicide attack in Aleppo at the end of February.
The Al Nusrah Front's emir, Abu Muhammad al Julani, has been at odds with Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the leader of the ISIS, after the latter attempted to subsume the Al Nusrah Front into the Islamic State in April 2013. Al Julani refused, and was backed by Ayman al Zawahiri, the head of al Qaeda.
Al Qaeda has attempted to mediate the dispute and has called on the ISIS to submit to sharia, or Islamic, courts in order to resolve the problems. Al Baghdadi has refused, and the two groups began clashing in late 2013.
At the end of February 2014, al Julani issued an ultimatum for the ISIS to end its attacks on jihadist and rebel units in Syria or the groups will destroy the ISIS in both Syria and in Iraq. He quickly backed down as al Qaeda has continued to attempt to resolve the dispute peaceably.

http://www.longwarjournal.org/threa...alSiteWide+(The+Long+War+Journal+(Site-Wide))

Longface
Syria: As the bombs fall, the people of Damascus rally round Bashar al-Assad


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It was a simple three-hour trip from Beirut to Damascus. The border crossing caused no problems, and thereafter the journey was interrupted by only a handful of checkpoints. My first impression of the Syrian capital, too, was that it is surprisingly safe. I saw no armed men on the streets during the journey to my hotel, and in the city centre life appeared to be continuing as normal. Residents even claimed that President Assad often drives himself to his office from the relatively modest flat where he lives, and can sometimes be seen stuck in the rush-hour traffic. When I had lunch at a restaurant with a government minister, there was no visible security at all.

But after only a few hours in this city, it becomes clear that Damascus is not normal in the slightest. Several of its suburbs are held by rebel fighters, who pound government-held areas with mortars. These do not have the range to reach the city centre, but most people live under the shadow of constant attack. It is as if the residents of Clapham had conceived a desire to annihilate Wimbledon and Brixton, and Islington had declared war on Camden Town.

As with the Blitz, these attacks appear completely random. Many of the shells land harmlessly, or do not explode. Others cause mayhem. On Tuesday, one struck a school in Bab Touma (St Thomas’s Gate), killing one child and wounding roughly 40. And over the past few days the volume of the bombardment has escalated sharply. An accountant who lives in the affluent suburb of Jaramana told me that his area had been hit almost 15 times before breakfast that morning.

On Palm Sunday, I went to the Old City and walked up Straight Street, following the route taken by St Paul after he had been blinded (Kokab, the scene of his Damascene conversion, is now in rebel hands). At the Greek Catholic church, I watched ceremonies of breathtaking beauty – in precincts that had been struck twice in the past week, though happily causing no injuries. On the way back, I passed a man looking dazed next to his ruined car. A mortar had struck it just a few minutes earlier. When I picked up the shell casing, it was still warm.

Over the past few days, I have talked to shopkeepers, students, soldiers, doctors, a dentist, MPs and government ministers (including the minister for tourism, who must have the most thankless job in the world). On the basis of these conversations, I would judge not just that support for the regime is holding up, but that President Assad could very well win a popular election, even if carried out on a free and fair basis. Such elections are in fact due: the president must hold a poll before July 17 if he is not to exceed his constitutional term of office. An announcement is expected soon.

Discussing this vote, I found – to my surprise – that even people outside the governing Ba’ath party, including some of Assad’s political opponents, said they would support him. Maria Saadah, an independent MP for Damascus, told me that her career as an architect had suffered because she did not belong to the Ba’ath, and that she had entered politics at the beginning of the crisis because she wanted to reform the system. But she added that the middle of a war against what she described as foreign-backed insurgents – which is how the regime ceaselessly depicts its opponents – was not the time for that. Syrian sovereignty, she said, had to come first.

This argument is very common. People here see their country as being threatened by foreign powers (above all Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, all backed by the West) who are sponsoring the jihadist groups that make up the opposition. I was struck by the fact that this argument is not made only by the Alawite coterie around the president. I also heard it from Sunni Muslims, Christians and members of the various other cultural and religious groups that abound in Syria.

How can this square with the Western narrative that President Assad’s government, with the aid of a handful of tribal followers, is hell-bent on the destruction of the rest of the country? Consider the facts. Only a handful of members of Assad’s 30-strong cabinet (I was told two) are Alawite. The prime minister is Sunni, as are the interior minister, the justice minister, the foreign minister, even the defence minister. The delegation that travelled to Geneva for the failed peace talks several months ago was also almost entirely composed of Sunni Muslims (though they would probably reject sectarian terms, and prefer to think of themselves just as Syrians).

Nor is it merely the political class that thinks in this way. Last night I had dinner with a young doctor. He showed me a Facebook exchange that he had recently had with a former friend from medical school, who has joined the extremist opposition group al-Nusra. The doctor had put out a public status aimed at all jihadists asking them: “Please stop shooting at us with your mortars.” He was astonished to receive a reply from his friend: “I will put a bullet in your heads.” My doctor friend messaged him back: “I am not afraid of you.” This was followed by a horrifying response. “We love death, we drink blood. Our president is dead bodies. Wait for our exploding cars to kill you.”

There the matter rests for the time being. When I asked whether the doctor was afraid, he shrugged his shoulders and told me: “Of course he can come and kill me any time, just by putting a package in front of my door, or asking someone to come and shoot me.”

When I was in Bab Touma, I was approached by a shopkeeper, who insisted on taking me to his antiques shop. There, he served me tea and told me without rancour that no customers came to visit any more, and there were no jobs.

He walked me along an alleyway to his home and pointed to a destroyed balcony where his mother had liked to sit. Two months ago, she had been resting there as usual when she was killed by a direct hit from a mortar. “Your government,” he told me, “is the worst ever; they want Syria to be a democracy and ally themselves with Saudi Arabia, which has nothing to do with democracy.”

I have only been in Damascus a few days and have been out of the city just once, on a government-sponsored trip to the ancient Christian village of Maaloula, claimed back this week from rebel forces. I have not spoken to the opposition (travel in rebel-held areas is impossibly hazardous: many journalists have been kidnapped). I have been accompanied for much of the time by a government minder. I am well aware that the government has committed dreadful atrocities, though I suspect that some of the accounts have been exaggerated.

Nevertheless, I do think the words of my shopkeeper friend are worth pondering. If the insurgents who killed his mother win the war, there will be no Christian churches in Syria any more (just as there aren’t in Saudi Arabia at the moment). Life will be similarly terrible for many of the ordinary Muslims who make up the great majority of the population.

There are no “good guys” in Syria’s civil war. But we should not be blind to the fact that there is a project out there to destroy its rich, pluralist and unbelievably intricate culture and replace it with a monochrome version of Wahhabi Islam, of the kind favoured by Saudi mullahs. And for reasons that history may come to judge very severely, Britain, the United States, and the West have been aiding and abetting this project.
Stubby

"wahhabi saudi mullahs".....

How is this fluff (and that's generous) any better than the anti-regime stuff that was more common a year ago?

Stubby
Longface
Syrian Rebel Wants a New Ally: Israel
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I spent more than a decade in Syrian prisons and therefore know what kind of regime this is. It is one which believes that torture is a form of dialogue. This was long before the Syrian uprising. Long before my countrymen went to the streets in a peaceful protest calling for freedom. Long before the death toll reached 150,000.

In the past three years, we Syrians have learned a lot about who our friends are and who our enemies are. Russia and Iran provide the backing critical for Bashar Assad to remain in power. Hezbollah filled the ranks of the Syrian army. Islamist radicals were brought in from other parts of the region attempting to take Syria away from the Syrian people who had risen to protest.

The United Nations and its allies try to support us by allowing diplomacy under the Geneva convention. But the Geneva process has effectively collapsed and we must again realize that much more must be done to stop the Assad dictatorship from continuing to slaughter its people. While we received humanitarian aid from America and Europe, more could have been done to weaken Assad.

Once, Israel was blamed for everything. But Israel is not our enemy anymore. We see how Israel opened its doors to our injured. We see how Syrian children are treated in Assad’s prisons and how they are treated in Israeli hospitals. Israel gave food while Assad starved his own people. Syria has only one enemy now: the Assad regime backed by Iran and Hezbollah. I meet with Syrian dissidents and military leaders daily and have seen how, after decades of brainwashing, their mentality has begun to change.

It is naive to believe that diplomacy can stop a regime that dismembers children in cold blood and uses chemical weapons against innocent civilians. We must first realize that Assad will not leave unless pushed away. Israel, which has felt the brunt of Assad’s recklessness through his support for terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, would be a natural ally.

It is naive to believe that diplomacy can stop a regime that dismembers children in cold blood and uses chemical weapons against innocent civilians. We must first realize that Assad will not leave unless pushed away. Israel, which has felt the brunt of Assad’s recklessness through his support for terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, would be a natural ally.

As Western powers allow us a process of diplomacy based on international law, radical groups have seized the opportunity to fill the void left by Assad’s brutality and the chaos that has followed. While it is true that proxy powers brought jihadis to fight their proxy wars I can tell you that the moderates who had started the revolution still exist and are still fighting. But they are desperate for support.

The Syrian people had to rise up because we were left alone: our children killed and wives raped in front of our very eyes. We had no choice but to defend ourselves. Nothing can bring back those gassed to death in Ghota or starved to death in Homs. But for the sake of tomorrow we must break the impasse; it will not be a conference in Geneva with Assad’s regime that does this.

The immediate step needed for the 4 million people displaced in Syria is the establishment of a protected free zone, in which Assad will have no reach and where the process of reconstruction can begin. Our allies in the United States, Europe, the Middle East and, yes, Israel, should act upon this resolution. We plead once again for help.

Obviously the Syrian problem is too complex for us to handle alone and, once again, we plead for help before even more civilians die. But we offer something else in a return, a paradigm shift that comes from people who have been awakened.

Let us join forces and change this Middle East. Yes, we can, together, to end a nightmare and begin to build a different chapter in our region. And we must start before all hopes are crushed by a killing machine that is destined to continue its work. We must act before it’s too late.


by Kamal al-Labwani, member of the Syrian opposition movement